


descanso iv. the flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood

by marythefan (marylex)



Series: descansos [3]
Category: Stargate: Atlantis
Genre: Female Protagonist, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-04-25
Updated: 2007-04-25
Packaged: 2017-10-06 21:03:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/57718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marylex/pseuds/marythefan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She starts cultivating something that looks a lot like <em>Lilium formosum</em> because - like its Earthly counterpart - it can be made to bloom year-round.<br/>Katie.<br/>For "Hot Zone."</p>
            </blockquote>





	descanso iv. the flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood

Katie starts cultivating something that looks a lot like _Lilium formosum_ because - like its Earthly counterpart - it can be made to bloom year-round.

Radek Zelenka was the first to come to her, looking for _Zantedeschia aethiopica_ or something near to its elegiac blooms. He showed up at the door of the secondary botany lab, hands sketching unspoken words to augment his halting request, half-ashamed - with the mechanical mindset of those whose resources aren't self-propagating - to ask if there might be superfluous plants that could be used for his purpose. Katie nodded and listened, patting nervously at the air until she could finally brush her fingers over his wrists as he wound down; she stilled his hands against her lab table and took her clippers to collect what ivory blossoms she could find.

He returns every two weeks, like clockwork, and she suspects he's the one who clears away the dry stalks and stems, who keeps the doorway neat at the sealed lab on the abandoned northeast pier.

It's always in bloom.

There's a steady trickle of people who hover uncomfortable in the doorways to the greenhouses - not a lot, but enough - and so Katie keeps an eye out for something that resembles the traditional yellow fringed _Dendranthema morifolium_ they can lay for Dr. Dumais. She cultivates a Pegasus equivalent of velvet _Viola tricolor_ for those who come for Dr. Peterson, the sharp wintergreen scent of its roots crawling inside her head as damp soil clings to her fingers, lingering on her hands as she stretches her back and shades her eyes to study the angle of afternoon sunlight falling through high glass panels onto the beds. As she catalogues specimens, she searches for something like _Iris virginica_ for Bernard Hays, and in her off hours, she does some hybridization, trying to create the brilliant purple of _hexagona_, the pale lavender petals and yellow crests of _brevilicus_ \- flowers she's only familiar with through hothouse cultivation and his stories of unnamed violet, violent blooms growing wild at the edge of Southern woodland. Sometimes she even goes to lay an armful of those blossoms in the doorway of the lab that provided no refuge.

The tawny hybrids, the _Iris fulva_, she mixes with the version of _Asclepias curassavica_ she's been cutting from a back corner of the summer greenhouse for Matteo Fusco since he appeared at the botany lab door and wandered aimlessly from table to plant box, movements fragmented. He struggled to speak of Dr. Johnson until he touched the inflorescent sprays of tiny orange and red flowers with trembling fingers, and then he fell silent. Katie hands over the flowers to him and keeps her face bland, but the _curassavica_ blooms year-round, too, and she's pretty sure there'll be too much call for its too-appropriate blooms before everything is said and done, and the air inside Atlantis is too antiseptic and sterile for the fluttering Monarchs that would adorn the bloodflower's crimson sprays on Earth, their trembling wings a constant, defiant reminder of life.

She still hasn't managed to get offworld, too busy in the labs and greenhouses of the city, but she asks Sasha to bring back cuttings of belled _Erica_ for Dr. Wagner. He doesn't ask questions, just comes to the greenhouse with armfuls of the Pegasus versions of royal _cinerea_ and rosy _carnea_ and snowy _arborea_, depending on the season and temperate zone of whatever planet he's just visited. Meanwhile, Katie nurses pots of funereal flowers that resemble sunny _Calendula officinalis_ and golden _Zinnia haageana_, collecting them on the balcony outside her personal quarters, deadheading them to encourage new blooms. When the Pegasus cousin of _Papaver rhoeas_ turns out to be just as resistant to propagation by cutting as its Milky Way counterpart, she waits until David finds a field gone to seed and then nurtures the plants in a cool, wet corner of the greenhouses, digging her fingers down deep into the sharp-scented soil where they'll take root, sprinkling sand over the seeds she casts, talking to the growing plants on her lunch break. She watches a soldier's callused fingers twining a clumsy wreath of the traditional scarlet blooms before he carries them away from the greenhouse, and she folds her smaller fingers over his to guide them.

She's thankful Rodney doesn't bring her flowers. She wonders if the oversight is one of the things that draws her to him. She thinks, sometimes, that she couldn't look at any blooms without wondering whose makeshift grave they should mark.


End file.
